In some ways, this blog and others like it are as simple as a negative proof of the product we've all set out to digest on a daily weekly annual basis. Where the Bills sell hope and change like they're running for something other than Regional Fuckboi, this space sells despair. There's a surplus and we'd like to unload it off our books, I figure, and it's a goddamn bargain for those interested in investing in distressed emotional debt.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention, while we're still processing my brutal metaphors, that my mission here is to write about our Bills in spite of myself and in spite of our Bills, that my brain is mush and can't possibly be asked to form coherent takes, and that here, by the grace of God go I, is where I am basically because Apologist said "hey write that recap" while we parted at a lonely midtown street corner some time ago.

Fuck the Bills and Love the Bills, alas and so on and so forth.

If time is a flat circle, as some claim it is, we're blessed to experience this kind of Bills team only once but also infinity times, so it's an open question whether that 3 point loss in Miami should be eminently shrug-off-able as 'just a thing that happened' or emotionally paralyzing as 'the thing that just happens every fuck-all time.' We're somewhere in the middle, most of us, and it's frankly just as dark a corner of cerebral sub-consciousness as sports can get. The cruelty of belief is that it's is a massively marketable phenomenon to attach to any given team, and many of us have been all-too-willing to hitch ourselves to the hope cultivated and farmed for the benefit of our preferred clubs, irrationality be fucked.

The cruelty of belief is that it is equal parts goodness and elusiveness, the treasure at the end of the rainbow, sight unseen.

Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of Billschausen syndrome, you either got all in with this team recently (Hi!) or were on the precipice (or you billieve unconditionally, in which case why are you here?), and depending on where you fall, you're either out now, huffing and puffing about the uselessness of it all, or at the very least have a foot in the door open while you consider things like whether you left the oven on and, if so, whether it might be more useful to stick your head right up in it on Sundays because why let this team suck the life out of you when you're fully capable of killing yourself all on your own.

In the same way that people are drawn to comments sections and cable news out of morbid curiosity at the train wreck humans involved, being a fan of this team is very much about the allure of something so earth-shatteringly shitty that you sort of need to crane your head to look. Besides, there's virtue in learning to repackage the experience of watching a terrible football team into a fun exercise in schadenfreude and moral superiority. So long as the team is going to trip over its own putrid tendencies towards failure, we may as well alight our hearts with ideas that we deserve better and that we have answers that would fix what ails our Bills, if only if only if only. So long as this team is going to struggle through another fall as if it's the harvest and they're farming melancholy, we may as well pull out a dictaphone and assemble a cacophony of sarcasm and derision as tribute to the Wagon-Circling Buffalo Bills, the only team that would consider it a badge of pride that they left home without a map, keep taking the wrong trail and have yet again stumbled upon some band of horsemen or patriots or birds or marine mammals or whatnot, thereby necessitating wagon circling from the get.

tl;dr: When you live in Chump City, it's no consolation that you've been elected mayor.

Don't get me wrong: I'm *still* hopeful, and therein lies the annoying and inestimable rub. All they gotta do is win this weekend and they'll show us they really are the team we hope them hahahahahahahahaha hahahaha.

(NB: Apologist will follow this with something more upbeat for the "has yet to succumb to crippling angst over their preferred sports teams yet" crowd, so feel free to skip this, but in the meantime it's time to flex some muscles and get a little stretch in. It’s been a while. Clear eyes, full hearts, can definitely lose it's actually likely.)

At a certain point after I left New York City to inexplicably put down some roots in the Garden State, after I decided to scale my day-to-day to a new place and new routine, new people and new options, I started thinking a lot about the legacy that our interests and priorities leave with us. This is often little more than self-indulgent introspection, for sure, but when you have some extra commuting time on your hands and most of that is sitting down on a regional train service that makes the NYC subway look like a frenetic cattle car complete with all the physio-fecal smells you come to expect, it's not the worst thing to make an effort to use the time to your advantage. It’s a pretty dumb habit in a lot of ways, most notably because I’m liable to get hung up on certain problems or anxieties at inappropriate times, including times when I'm by no means alone, which makes the whole exercise self-defeating sometimes.

By way of example - which is not needed to illustrate the point but since when is necessity a prerequisite? - this past weekend I went to a small wedding with some old friends and as I navigated the evening with my too-good-for-me wife, the pitfalls for an extroverted over-sharer like myself were everywhere. By the time the after-party kicked into gear, my BAC checking in at a respectable clip and my six foot two inch frame questioning its close relationship with me given my inability to sit still during a Bruno Mars song, I was in a really good place. And when I say good, I obviously mean that I was telling way too many stories about shenanigans both past and present, talking about work way too much and making new best friends that I most surely will never see again. As my too-good-for-me wife is bound to remind me, frequently, people don’t really care about my shit. The friend of the bride did not love me hijacking a conversation to talk about markets and self-interested fucks who ruin our economy, but that’s where my head was at after the handful of Finger Lakes Rieslings, I was having a moment and needed to work through it, and also I totally apologized later and we ended up having a hilarious night and homegirl is on that list of great humans and new best friends that I will definitely forget to keep in touch with.

To put it a different way, introspection is not really a team sport, by its nature, but man do I like to triage my bullshit out in plain view. I totally get that people aren’t necessarily on board, especially when they’ve known me for all of twenty minutes, it’s just that I don’t really care.

You shouldn't smoke these. They'll kill you

In the midst of these indulgent bullshit problems I let consume me as I seek a less arduous, more interesting way to get through each day without feeling some vaguely defined weight on my shoulders, constructed by a job that delightfully lays waste to my health and well-being and a home I feel like is being held together by duct tape and hasty prayers to no one in particular, the decisions about how to cut through that bullshit to prioritize the to-do list I have on my plate become a matter of imperatives.

Me? I like to put down markers in my memory, emphasizing what’s important and what experiences get earmarked for consideration at some later date. It’s entirely hokey to discuss, yet nevertheless plainly true for me that life is far easier to manage when you place markers into the dirt along your personal timeline and attempt to categorize information in some useful way. Whether laid down in hindsight or in real time, those notches in our history provide a point of reference within the series of stored memories, making it easier to look back and make sense of the progression of time; easier to lean forward with some degree of well-defined perspective on how our past is prologue.

​So, I suppose, we choose what matters to us and we likewise choose to put down those markers to help us make sense of those valued portions of our life. We power rank the fuck out of our varied interests and dreams and the varied people and places and institutions we consider our own, and in the end we sort the information into buckets and probably power rank the buckets as well. In the first one you get all the non-negotiables, the stuff you can’t live without, and in the last bucket are the frivolities and dreams and luxuries, and somewhere in between is where the shit gets really complicated.

A bunch of nonsense, non-formative moments can be swept under the rug of our subconscious: the time you chatted up someone at a bar out of boredom; the passing moment on a dance floor during yet another wedding reception of yet another friend/cousin/sibling/child; the 18th time you watched a team you love play a milquetoast field-goal-riddled game against some milquetoast squad from some (as it turns out) usefully pathetic city.

A career, a friendship, a love affair, a family? Your list will be different than mine, but when we rank our priorities, when we decide to carve out space in our journey (or not) for those things and let them impact our days in the short-term (or not), the way we sort through our experiences and internalize a memory or a feeling takes on varying degrees of importance. We remember names of family members and concepts necessary for our jobs and how our spouse smelled the first time our kid fell asleep with us on the couch; we probably don’t remember the name of the guy we bump into sometimes on the train, or the way a friend we see twice a year takes her coffee.

And then we have football.

(And yes, I’m aware that I overthink things. If you’re new here, a hearty welp to you. Welcome to the Jungle, we’ve got fun and games and our teams are basically gout. If you’re not new here, settle the fuck down, and yes that means you Joe Buffalo Wins. I’m sure you have some amazing tweets to ping me with soon, bud, and I’m sure they’ll be really well-phrased.)

I want to stick around the spring of hope that we suddenly stumbled upon these last couple weeks. I really do. There’s nothing I want more than to wait out this short week between games, watch the Bills play the Dolphins and hold onto this rare, stubborn feeling for another week or two. Our Bills are not mathematically eliminated. The task is not impossible. Maybe the current state-of-things-and-numbers should be enough to keep us all around the water cooler with more than a little bit of optimism. The Bills are still in the mix! It’s November! Any Given Sunday! Fucking hell. We’ve seen this movie before, and no matter how many times you tell yourself that things can’t go down like this every fucking time, it just doesn’t matter. There's always one thing or another that creeps into frame and ensures that success will remain just out of reach. We knew this was coming, I suppose, but it hurts just as much. Others will break down what went wrong yesterday, and you can go read them. I’m just too fucking sad today and can’t find much energy to make jokes while telling you what you already know about the Chiefs win in Orchard Park. Watching Bills football has been fun this year, despite where we’re at right now. And it will probably be fun over the course of the next few weeks, and the team may even tease a little more optimism out of our eager tweeting fingers and blogging hands. This is a team that is incredibly enjoyable to watch, regardless of the persisting faults in areas here (the offensive line) and there (the other side of the offensive line). It’s a team built on immense talent, a top tier defense, and a real apparent desire of players to win in and for Buffalo. Even so, watching Bills football has been fucking maddening this year. And it will most assuredly be maddening right through Week 17. Set against a roster with overflowing talent and skill and desire and sheer likeability, the broader Buffalo Bills franchise has been all-too-willing to forfeit that abundance of quality through a persistent lack of quality amongst the men really in charge. Compounding the unavoidable mistakes inherent in sport and the physics of its execution are the unacceptable decisions of a Head Coach deserving nothing more or less than the label of “coward.” We have at our disposal, as consumers of this particular entertainment product, honest-to-God sports heroes playing for our Buffalo Bills. Heroes because of their persisting desire to succeed for us despite the significant bodily risks attendant that endeavor, but even more so for what they have been able to accomplish in spite of the cowardice of their Head Coach. Catching a football is not always an easy task. Throwing a ball on a dime 30 yards down the field is hard. Blocking and running and tackling and working on a football field, all the while trying to keep your body intact for fear of pain and financial heartbreak and the scorn of fans quick to label you weak should you get hurt too often … all of this is hard. Which isn’t to say that the demands of being a Head Coach in the NFL are not hard. But let’s not fucking kid ourselves. Doug Marrone owes his players – these men who have risked everything while Marrone stands on the sidelines adorned in shitty khakis and a vacant face – far more than the cowardice he has displayed. It’s about time we stop pretending that there’s all that much grey area in terms of assessing the quality of decisions being made by the Head Coach of the Buffalo Bills. Our guys are out there killing themselves to win for us, playing the most dangerous professional sport on earth. The least we can do as we start the long process of giving up whatever hope we allowed ourselves is stand up and start demanding a Head Coach that honors these players in some discernible way. Doug Marrone simply hasn't.

The thought crosses my mind often. Walking away from this blog, saving myself the smattering of credit card payments to keep a website and podcast hosting on, and doing something else with my weekends not to mention weekdays because here I fucking am on a fucking Tuesday, filled with some vague desire to let all the words and frustrations flow out of my fingers and, maybe this time, leave me empty of all the bullshit that inevitably invades my emotional palate every year sometime between September 10th and October 15th.

It never leaves, though. The inescapable truth of a brisk autumn and the predictably drab Buffalo Bills football that comes with it. This is, for better or worse, what we got.

I've mumbled on here before about the community of watching the Bills. I called into WGR when the Pegulas bought the team and mumbled on about how the Bills are the way I connect with home; about how they're a tangible link that brings about high fives and unexpected friendship 400 miles from where I grew up.

They are and they aren't.

It gets harder every year since I left to give a shit. Hell, I only lived in Buffalo for 12 years before moving away, and while those 12 years were a formative time, it is becoming apparent that the love I have for the team - or, to put it better, the need I have for the team to connect me to home - is probably not without its endpoint. This, of course, being the time when I blame the team for not fostering my devotion to the Bills and to Buffalo, rather than the unavoidable byproduct of being an expat whose parents moved away from WNY as soon as it was apparent that I was probably not coming back.

I can count the number of Bills games I remember attending in Orchard Park on one hand. Why some friends thought it was wise to let me write here is still anyone's guess. If you were to quantify the percentage of Buffalo a person can claim in their makeup, I'd be on the low side, with dishearteningly high levels of New England influence. It happens. Maybe disinterest in maintaining a connection home was bound to fail. Relying on manufactured sport to bind me to a place is at best a silly task, and at worst an invitation for a blowtorch to the heart.

Yet, here here I am, wondering if this season is the one that it starts mattering little if anything to me now that our team has yet again found itself in the most predictable of pickles. A QB who has lost the confidence of his head coach; a head coach and offensive coordinator determined to misuse that QB, ignore the few things he does right, and move onto the next guy as if there aren't fundamental flaws within the men drawing up the Xs and Os; a fan base falling over itself to declare themselves supreme football intellectuals and prophets, the first to have decided that the QB was going to fail as if betting on the Bills to fail was ever truly an ambitious move.

Anyone happy about what has happened with the Bills since Sunday can jump off a bridge into a crocodile vagina for all I care. It's shitty. Everything is pain. Kyle Orton is what would happen if Roy Munson procreated with Ishmael and the baby decided that his natural calling wasn't bowling, despite his genetics, fat face and neck beard, but football. I may be cheering my balls off with the rest of you clowns who celebrate another lost season just because it makes you right, but I won't like it.

So, is this the year I start reevaluating my love affair with the misfits at One Bills Drive? Not fucking likely, as it turns out. What the fuck of it. Let's recap the shit out of the last two weeks and figure out where the fuck we are before it stops being fun again.

You know, I'm really tempted to lay my heart out on this metaphorical table and reveal it for all of you to see. I refrained from doing so when we all said goodbye to Miller, mostly because the long, drawn-out inevitability of the deal made the whole thing too depressing for me to really face when it happened because I already had done so a dozen times.

I don't know what good it will do me. Or you. Some restraint is how I'll keep myself together.

Today floored me. Not because it wasn't rumored, but because it all happened so quickly, so wrapped up in the nonsense that seems to have been following Stevie Johnson for the past three or four years, that it was easily dismissible. It could be swept away with the trash of criticisms of his "attitude problems" - the guy LOVED being a Buffalo Bill, what other kind of attitude do you need? - and the criticisms of his inconsistent play - the guy broke franchise records and did so catching balls from, and this is being kind, shitstain QBs - and whatever other rumblings kept popping up about him not being elite or being able to catch the game-winning balls. I made some of these criticisms, to be fair; even a few today as I processed the news.

Today didn't seem like it could happen because, fucking hell, this was one of *our* guys. When he dropped that ball against Pittsburgh, the reaction that followed - his reaction - was because he was one of our guys. It wasn't because he was selfish or had lost perspective or hated God ... it was because he loved us. He loved the Bills. It fucking mattered to him in a way that was surprising, that was jarring in its expression, and that was ultimately the foundation of what endeared Stevie so much to me.

There was never a question that this guy was committed to making my team better and to finding a way to make it win. And so, for me, there was never really a question - not when the rumors started and not when the Bills snagged Watkins last night and revealed their hand - as to whether I could imagine him not being a Bill and no longer being one of *our* guys.

I couldn't.

He was flawed, not unlike the franchise and fan base he played for, but in the midst of those flaws he participated in the task of Buffalo Bills football in a manner that was ultimately unassailable. In a manner of quality that was unmatched by the vast majority of his teammates, the executives and coaches he played for, and the fan base that wavered between support and scorn.

He was flawed and fantastic and bemoaned and beloved. He was often just what we needed, and often not quite enough.

And now, well... we come to is the familiarity of it, the task of wrapping one's head around the idea of a great, beloved player leaving Buffalo ... no matter how deep that love is or was, it's necessarily paired with a similarly deep regret.

Back from the dead, The Scizz joins The Barrister for some delightful conversation wherein the pair take endless potshots at everyone, talk about the pitiful Buffalo hockey club, ponder Donald Trump and the meaning of life, and discuss the Wayans brothers. And other stuff probably. Music from The Jambrones, LCD Soundsytem, Pearl Jam, and Electric Guest

The OutlanderIt seems it’s been awhile. I wish I had a good excuse but I don’t. I got a new laptop, I have literally all hours of the day to write these days, and with a new GM, tank watch, a thrilling EPL season, the ridiculously overwrought freakout about Pettine’s departure and the my hatred for John Scott, there really isn’t a shortage of topics. What there has been is a shortage of interest. When one is unemployed, whether the Sabres get to 29th or 30th place really loses its status on the list of concerns. Of course, it’s times like this where sports serve one of their best roles, one of distraction. Really, if one is going to be unemployed, being so while your baseball team is in the playoffs and the Olympics are some eight time zones away are about as good of times as one could imagine. But first, some sports takes need to be voiced. I don’t follow the twitter accounts of other NHL teams, for a couple reasons. First, I don’t watch other teams play hockey unless it relates to me as a Sabres fan. For many years this meant “hey, this team is on the bubble too,” or “this could be an ECF opponent,” or “let’s see how the west is doing JUST IN CASE.” So no, I don’t care what the Kings, or the Sharks, or Blue Jackets, or the Panthers twitter is saying. It’s irrelevant to me and occasionally annoying because it’s usually a subtle way of someone saying “I’m a better hockey fan than you because SEE!?!?” Maybe you are, but I’m a Sabres fan. Shut up and go away. However, there is a narrative I have learned from these people, many friends, who do follow some or even all the NHL teams on social media: we suck at it.

As usual, higher billing given to the shittier player

I’m not a social media expert. I know what I find annoying, I know what I like, and naturally I gravitate towards people who like and don’t like similar things as me. Here’s what I also know. John Scott sucks at hockey, period. Mike Weber sucks at hockey, period. Cody McCormick probably still sucks at hockey, period. Marcus Foligno is a great idea, but when you’re relegated to the fourth line on this team, probably less great as a hockey player. The Buffalo Sabres are a hockey team in the NHL, one that presumably tries to win every time they’re on the ice (shut the hell up about the merits of that, I’ll be with you in a minute). They’re really bad at that, the worst in the league, even. So why in the living fuck do the Sabres social media people insist on talking about these worthless players? Well, we know why. The Sabres social media and fan outreach folks are doing what Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Huff Post since it got terrible, and most other outlets on television and the internet do. They reach out to the lowest common denominator, or as Richard Nixon called them, the Silent Majority. Of course the Silent Majority are comprised largely of a brainless clump of folks who just love Storage Wars and Springsteen and god and guns and think bullying is just a part of growing up and why can’t we have a white history month too!? They’re also TBN’s wheelhouse, whiner line callers, and the idiots on that “we love Steve Ott GO SABRES” commercial. They’re the ones who favorite Marcus Foligno pictures and buy “BIG JOHN” shirtsies. So what do the Sabres tweet about? John Scott practice goals and Marcus Foligno’s uncle. The nuanced fans, the fans who know the game best, who love the team for the team, not for some big doofus whose appeal is that HE’S SO BAD BUT HE’S BIG AND TRYING SO IT’S CUTE RIGHT, these are the fans forgotten in this whole thing. Maybe if the team was able to give a wink to the sheer hilarity of their ineptitude, to the predicament we all as fans find ourselves in together, the online interaction could be a bright spot. But some people are just so desperate for positive reinforcement, they’ll cater it from whomever offers it, even if that so happens to be teenage girls and middle aged dads who only discovered the team through those very same teenage daughters. These are the same people that claim America’s health care is the best in the world, that we’re the shining light on a hill, that our military causes are always just and the casualties always necessary. The one’s who get bent out of shape about a commercial featuring different languages, that claim god must exist because golly-gee that sunset is so purdy. These people live in a world of denial, just as anyone who pushes John Scott to the fans is in denial about the state of him or of the team he plays for. How to fix it? I don’t know, I’m an unemployed JD, not a fucking social media manager. I know it’s more than tailoring to a different audience, it’s changing your entire goddamn outlook. You shouldn’t be Kenneth on 30 Rock all the time. Some things suck, it happens, and regarding this team, almost everything regarding the current situation sucks more than anything has sucked before, to steal from the Beavis and Butthead movie. But I know the one thing that doesn’t suck- the prospects, the future- is never fucking discussed. This may be because the puck bunnies and grit-obsessed cementheads don’t know or care who JT Compher or Jake McCabe are, but when they play on national television, I shouldn’t be stumbling upon their game by fucking accident. The Amerks are hot, but I know that only through the Amerks social media and the feeds of my friends that have the opportunity to follow them closer than I. The Sabres are telling us to like the very things that are part of the reason the team is so shitty, not the reasons the team won’t be so shitty quite soon. I know that’s a strategy the intelligent minority doesn’t appreciate. Not discussing the prospects or the fact that the future lasts longer than "GOOD SEATS STILL AVAILABLE" simply creates dumber fans and the perpetual cycle of whiner line callers, TBN sheep, Cody McCormick truthers will continue on forever. Which is sad for anyone who enjoys watching and discussing this team, but is at least a boon for pushing merch RIGHT NOW. Not hard to see where the priorities lie. Of course the nuanced fans aren’t free from the grips of being yammering tools now and again. Let me say this again: yes, the Sabres losses are good for the draft, I want to be at the top of the draft, I fucking get it, and you’re not wrong. What is stupid, what is really, extremely grating and off-putting, is anyone cheering losses. “Well, one step closer to Ekblad,” is another thing from “Gotta hope [Team X] comes back in the third!” when the Sabres are winning. Fuck you, no I don’t have to hope for that. The draft is the reward for being shitty, and in case you haven’t noticed, this team can’t win! What, you’re concerned for a five game win streak coming out of their ass? Have you SEEN them playing this season? How they have 15 wins is remarkable and half of them can be explained simply by “they scored a goal they had no business scoring.” I can root for them to win tonight because they probably won’t and they probably won’t tomorrow. Because can you imagine what this team is going to look like after Miller and Moulson are gone? Jesus, go back to being a fan for a couple months, it won’t hurt you or make you an idiot, I promise. And if it does make you an idiot, well at least the Sabres store has BIG JOHN shirts in stock.

I don’t know if this is going to be my last Bills post of the season. Last night, full of such familiar rage after such a familiar loss, I couldn't imagine concocting any more takes on a team that has so thoroughly shat on my heart now that the rest of the games matter only in some vague developmental-yet-still-really-meaningless-because-fuck-it-all-they-are-still-objectively terrible way. Having just finished this post, I'm still not sure.

If ever there was a mixed fucking bag of a weekend for me and my sport-watching-and-commenting brethren, it was this one. A tremendous Liverpool win, a Sporting KC win forcing the Red Bulls to do the same in order to get their first taste of hardware, a predictable Bills loss at the Superdome, replete with frustrating football and officiating alike, the Red Bulls getting that win and that shield, and Thomas Vanek.

If you're not into the Sabres and came here for Bills-only takes, my not-apologies, fuck you and wait a minute while I opine.

We expected this for Vanek - a guy who all but said he wasn't interested in sticking around this shit bag franchise anymore - though the swiftness with which the trade came late on a Sunday, months before we really expected it, was jarring. You want to be able to steel yourself up for a moment like this; a moment where a player so dear to you and the entire fan base is allowed to go, for now, to a place where things look discernibly brighter and more optimistic; a moment where a player is allowed to walk away, leaving his fans pining for the "could have beens" from a frustrating six years of Sabres hockey. He was a guy you wanted to be wearing the Blue and Gold when this ship eventually (please?) gets righted, but the impossibility of that scenario - Vanek staying and the rebuild occurring with some degree of speed - was unmistakable. He really couldn't stay if all the shit needing fixing is going to get addressed.

A fact that doesn't make it feel any better to see a talent like him depart the club we support.

Vanek has been the sole reason this team was able to fake it for so long, convincing fans and owner alike that the team could figure it out and become a contender; that the deals for Stafford and Myers and Leino and whoever else you want to point to wouldn't be fatal; that perhaps Buffalo could win in spite of those decisions proven to be mistakes by disappointing play and empty nets missed, by out-of-shape camps and defensive gaffes, and by games missed ad infinitum.

Vanek is a talent that seemed to make anything possible, but nevertheless never did. No titles. No Cup runs under his leadership. No true moments where you could really, reasonably think that he was taking the team somewhere other than consecutive sequences of mediocrity with brief pauses for ultimately inconsequential brilliance.

Perhaps I've spent more than enough words on a guy who has won nothing, but received our love anyway, and who is now simply gone. I'd say good luck, but let's be honest, I want all that luck for the squad he's leaving behind.

Tomorrow night the longest lockout shortened season in the history of sports is coming to an end. Seriously, it’s only been three months; I have the schedule in front of me and everything. If you want highlights only, this will be a quick read for you: season opener, three Boston wins, comeback against Montreal, snapping Pittsburgh’s win streak. There, you can go back to whatever it was you were doing before you got here; I’m only writing this because the Wild Card is some sort of wunderkind and I’m feeling inadequate. Actually I’ll give you one more highlight: waking up at the gate in JFK at 7:30am after Occupy Newark, surrounded by dozens of people with only hazy recollection of how I got there. Probably should have just taken Scizz’s couch invite instead of taking a cab to the airport at 4am, but I am thankful for whatever TSA agent kindly let me through security.

That still-intoxicated confusion amongst the chaos of a crowded airport terminal is indicative of the season we just watched. What happened? Why was everything so terrible? Why am I still wearing this Vanek jersey? Well, I watched nearly every game and I don’t have the slightest goddamn clue. All I know is this is the first season I didn’t see a win in person since 2003-2004 and I’ve spent nearly all of those seasons in between living hours away. Well that, and that there were many specific things that came together like some sort of horrifying, malevolent Captain Planet to ruin our evenings three times a week.

At first I was just going to list all the things that were horrible about this season but as I got to eleven it struck me that first, with enough time this list could go on perpetually as if I was writing out the decimals in pi, looking for an end, and second, I wanted to identify what was worse than all the others; what, when matched up against the other “worst” things on the list, made the others lookbetter. Think of this like a Bill Simmons' NBA trade value column, except you’ve heard of these names and I don’t get paid for it. To properly settle this, I decided to seed the eight worst entities about this season and match them up in a tournament format to see what exactly would come out on top (bottom?), along with my analysis.

To the seedings:9 (Honorable Mention): John Scott - I definitely bitched about his presence on the ice more than some of the things found below, but when compiling this list I felt he may have gotten a bad rap from me. First, we all knew coming in he wasn't skilled at hockey. Two, it wasn't his decision to put him in the lineup constantly, leaving talented- err, less awful players scratched. However, he would have cracked my top 8 if it wasn't for his photobombing post-game interviews late in the season. So, thanks to some stellar off-ice moves, Scott does not make the most hated tournament. But seriously, get the fuck off my team now.8) Jochen Hecht: I’m not sure what I hate more, his complete ineptitude on offense, the rare moments when that ineptitude disappears, or the fact that everyone involved in making organizational decisions loves this guy for reasons beyond understanding. Ruff, Regier and Rolston have raved about this statue and I haven’t the slightest fucking clue. Giving Hecht top line minutes was effectively hoping for a 1-0 win or a 2-1 overtime loss, and despite this I STILL don’t trust them to cut ties after this season. He’s a fucking 80’s horror villain. Go away.7) Drew Stafford: Fuck Drew Stafford. Thanks for those two shootout goals I guess, dickface.6) The Buffalo News: This is primarily a credit to their belief that all the teams ills would have been solved if the owner had commented about Regier or the Pominville trade. Watching them slowly melt down during the season into petulant children was pretty funny when I wasn’t annoyed by the pettiness and lack of professionalism by people who actually do get paid to write for a living. Plus they’re fucking creepy. Solid dark horse as a six seed